On rural poets

This morning I belatedly began listing the poets I've read and enjoyed who lived in rural areas or are largely known for poems about rural areas. The more I pondered, the more I surprised myself. I suspect there's a certain amount of self-selection involved here. There's also a strong counter to those who would consider rural communities full of nothing but parochial bumpkins. None of these poets limited their writings to rural subjects although perhaps considering the universality of rurality is probably a better way to think about that. Here's some of those I've thus far though of:

• Robert Bly - western Minnesota farm


• Wendell Berry - Kentucky farm


• Donald Hall - Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire


• Jane Kenyon - Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire


• Ted Kooser - rural Nebraska


• Jim Harrison - Patagonia, Arizona; Livingston, Montana; farm in Michigan


• Robert Frost - Vermont and Massachusetts


• Joyce Sutphen - southern Minnesota


• Bill Holm - Minneota, Minnesota

I have no doubt that additional time and effort and thinking would lengthen the list above, probably considerably. What might also be an interesting exercise would be to review the biographies or autobiographies or memoirs of these and similar poets to see what common themes might emerge about why these well educated, literate, intelligent folks chose to live in rural America. Could it be that a society wishing to be truly cultured needs a transect of urban, rural, wild and other places? Do we have more in common than we focus on while we debate which of our differences should prevail?

stone wall fence: urban or rural? fencing in or fencing out?

Photo by J. Harrington

Was Robert Frost anticipating our current "urban / rural divide" when he wrote:

Mending Wall

By Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

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